Remember those rainy afternoons when you were stuck indoors as a kid, doing crafts with empty cereal boxes? What about the funfair: rolling into the local park with the promise of magic and thrills – as long as you looked past the chipped paint and patched-up tents? There's a similar imaginative resilience to Brian Griffiths's sculptures. They ask us to confront boredom and general grimness and, in spite of it all, make the leap that turns a cardboard box into a spaceship: to grit our teeth, crack a smile and enjoy the ride.

In the late 1990s, Griffiths used kitchen cast-offs such as cardboard and margarine tubs to create retro versions of home computers and spaceship control panels. More recently, car-boot bric-a-brac and charity shop furniture have been reconfigured as angels, ships or pirates. His work is full of references to the circus's fading charms: tiny clown figurines find themselves buried up to their necks in vases full of sand, like Winnie in Beckett's play Happy Days. Giant, shabby teddy-bear heads are rigged up from stretches of canvas.

With a handful of major solo shows outside the capital under his belt and a nomination for Trafalgar Square's coveted Fourth Plinth commission, the past decade has seen Griffiths emerge as one of Britain's most appealing artists. His sculpture is inventive, witty and tinged with a peculiarly British realism, attuned to crap weather and clapped-out bangers.

His current exhibition is called The Invisible Show in deference to HG Wells's classic The Invisible Man. Here, Griffiths's canvas sheets are fitted over giant cuboid frames, like the suit Wells's hero must wear in public: lift up the hems and the illusion falls apart. Then again, you might just be tempted to duck under, escape the gallery and transform these canvas boxes into little worlds of your own.

Why we like him: For Life Is a Laugh, Griffiths's 2007 Art on the Underground commission, where he turned a disused tube platform into a Krypton Factor-style obstacle course that passengers on passing trains could see. It included heaps of sand, ladders, rusting petrol barrels and a giant painted breezeblock panda head with vacant black pools for eyes – what Griffiths calls his "Croydon Jeff Koons".

Funny ha ha? Rigsby, the miserable antihero of that most Beckettian British sitcom, Rising Damp, is a major influence on Griffiths's work.